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    No daylight, kid:

    Biden would say publicly that Harris should do what she must to win. But privately, including in conversations with her, he repeated an admonition: let there be no daylight between us. “No daylight” was the phrase he had used as a vice presidential candidate in 2008 to bind Republican nominee John McCain to an unpopular president, George W. Bush.

    This is an excerpt from the forthcoming book “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House” By Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.

    Perhaps it’s masochistic to begin reading the 2024 post-election tell-all books, but I’m a sucker and I absolutely will. I still maintain that Kamala Harris was, and is, a viable candidate and can be an effective President. However, she was done a disservice by President Biden that no one could overcome.

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    Garrett Graff writes the FBI’s obituary:

    “While the institution’s independence had been on life support since January 30th, when the bureau’s top career agents were purged in an unprecedented move and the Justice Department announced it wanted the identities of thousands of agents and personnel who contributed to the investigation of the attempted insurrection on January 6th, the final cause of death was the avarice and cowardliness of 51 Republican senators who voted to confirm Kash Patel as its ninth director.”

    [via Political Wire]

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    Russell Vought, Project 2025 contributor and current director of the Office of Management and Budget and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau:

    We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.

    The accompanying video and more info via Kottke.

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    There’s no doubt the Trump/Elon-led regime is currently running circles around Democratic lawmakers. And while it’s important we organize, mobilize, and fight to preserve the pillars of democracy, I’m reminded what Ezra Klein told us in his column earlier this month titled “Don’t Believe Him”:

    If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.

    Don’t believe him. Trump has real powers — but they are the powers of the presidency. 

    Three headlines from Political Wire reinforce this:

    He’s still a dangerous idiot who has learned to better recruit people who will empower his agenda. But he’s an idiot nonetheless and he doesn’t have the discipline, as a citizen or President, to ever go beyond “flooding the zone” to producing a series of tangible outcomes.

    Our true north until the next elections is to avoid the dizzying pace of headlines and to remain committed to the cause or causes that matter most to you and that will get you to take action — locally or beyond.

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    Miranda July’s 2024 novel All Fours is set to become a TV series on Starz. All Fours is my favorite novel in a while and it’s perfect for streaming. If you haven’t yet read it, I hear the way to go is the audiobook version read by July.

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